King, 39, died 39 years ago
Reflections of witness Billy Kyles

By Ben Kamin

April 4, 2007

'What brings you to Memphis?” I was asked by the matronly receptionist at the downtown hotel, just blocks from the Lorraine Motel, while visiting there recently. I was writing a book, I explained, about that year – 1968 – when I was 15, and America's social laureates, such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, were being gunned down, and the fruit of our youth was being consumed in blood and smoke in a senseless war far away and my classmates and I, at the cusp of maturity, were afraid of the future.

“I saw the reverend, you know,” she mentioned, in a sad, self-effacing way, that did not draw any attention to anything but to an emptiness in her soul. “Oh, he was here a lot that spring. It rained a lot. And many of the men were with the garbage trucks. He came here to help them. And when he died over there at the Lorraine, they felt so bad. Did you go over to the Lorraine Motel yet and see the balcony?”

I had, of course, and had seen the startling familiar motel sign, the balcony, the tired wreath, so familiar from a thousand reproductions on television, movies and in newsprint – but the real sight almost blinded me. It wasn't from the afternoon light: The day was pale and doleful and clouds covered the Earth and the gravel and the few grieving dogwoods and the railings and the blue doors and the drawn white curtains across the expanse of the immortal motel that is now the National Civil Rights Museum.

No, it wasn't from the light that I was almost blinded but from the almost incomprehensible sense that the Lorraine, site of the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. 39 nine years ago when he was 39, was real. It was from the balcony setback where the father of my soul, known to his closest intimates as “Mike,” freshly shaven on the evening of April 4, 1968, hungry for dinner at the house of his friend, Rev. Billy Kyles, lay dying in what was now in the line of my vision and that the debilitating spring of '68 was verily connected to me and my generation forever, dreadfully true and significant and historic.

The Rev. Samuel “Billy” Kyles, tall, wiry, deep-voiced, kindly, pastor of the Monumental Baptist Church, spoke to me about those last two days and nights, April 3 and 4, 39 years ago. “Martin had always been afraid of being killed, you know.” Kyles confirmed my inquiry that King was depressed and exhausted at the very end of his life, when the Memphis sanitation strike had taken violent turns and the Poor People's Campaign slated for Washington that coming summer was mired in financial and political difficulties. Billy Kyles was a witness when Dr. King exhaled his immortal “I've Been to the Mountaintop” speech on the storm-tossed and prophetic night of April 3. Less than 24 hours later, Kyles would wrap the martyred reverend in an orange blanket on the Lorraine balcony. About the night of April 3, Kyles told me: “Yes, Martin preached the fear of death out of himself that night. He was exhausted, and Ralph (Abernathy) was going to speak. But the crowd wanted Martin, so Ralph called him and he came over.”

MLK lived with the fear of assassination?

“Martin had always been afraid of being killed. That night, we had a terrible storm. Rain was pounding on the roof, and the rafters shook with the thunder and lightning. The thunderclaps and the wind sent the windows banging. Each time it happened, Martin flinched. He was sure someone was lurking and going to shoot him.

But when he got to the end of the speech and told us that he had looked over and seen the Promised Land, a great calm came over him. Everyone was transfixed. He was freed from his fear and actually he was telling us that it would be all right. When he finished speaking, he almost fell into our arms. He was bathed in sweat but you could see relief in his face.”

Kyles continued: “The next day he was so playful. I hadn't seen him so happy in years. He was carefree, kidding everybody. When Andy (Young) came back from court in the afternoon, he started a pillow fight in the motel room. He was teasing me about my new house, saying it was too fancy for a simple preacher. He teased me about dinner, which we were going to have at my house that evening. He said it had better be real soul food, good food, or he'd tell everybody I couldn't deliver. He was happy.”

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., American humanitarian, anti-war spokesman, was on his way to Kyles' home for dinner at 6 p.m. on Thursday evening, April 4, 1968. He stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel and took in the cool air. A single bullet knocked him down with terrible force. Billy Kyles, Ralph Abernathy, Andrew Young and the others gathered around him, trying to comprehend the pool of blood. None of these men, including their fallen Moses, was even 40 years old.

Says Billy Kyles, his tears dried up over the equivalent years: “He didn't die in some foolish way, untoward way. He didn't overdose. He wasn't shot by a jealous lover. He died helping garbage workers.”

Measured by King's life-span, it wasn't so long ago.

Kamin, a San Diego rabbi and author, has completed his sixth book, “Nothing Like Sunshine: A Memoir of My High School, A Friend, and Martin Luther King.”

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me@rescam.org

Steve is waaay to nice, she is not that nice looking on the eyes!

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The best pricing policy on gasoline

GEORGE F. WILL
THE WASHINGTON POST

April 5, 2007

They come with metronomic regularity, these media stories about “soaring” gasoline prices and the causes thereof, news stories that always identify the same two culprits, supply and demand. The stories always give various reasons why supplies are tight – more often, why prices include a risk premium based on fears that supplies might become tight – or why demand is higher than it “should” be, given supposedly high prices.

Today, as the price of a gallon of regular ($2.70 nationally on Monday) “soars” almost to where it was (measured in constant dollars) in 1982, the “news” is: “Drivers Offer a Collective Ho-Hum as Gasoline Prices Soar” (The New York Times, last Friday). People are not changing their behavior because the real, inflation-adjusted cost of that behavior has not changed significantly, and neither has the cost of the commodity in question, relative to disposable income.

The next wave of stories about “soaring” gas prices will predictably trigger some politicians' indignation about oil companies' profits. The day after ExxonMobil's announcement that it earned $39.5 billion in 2006, Hillary Clinton said: “I want to take those profits, and I want to put them into a strategic energy fund that will begin to fund alternative smart energy, alternatives and technologies that will begin to actually move us toward the direction of independence.”

Clinton's “take” reveals her confiscatory itch. Her clunky “toward the direction of” suggests that she actually knows that independence is as chimeric a goal as Soviet grain production goals were.

President Bush proposes reducing gasoline usage 20 percent in 10 years. Perhaps. After the oil shocks of the late 1970s, gasoline consumption fell 12 percent and did not again reach 1978 levels until 1993. This decline was produced by an abrupt and substantial increase in the price of gasoline, which no politician, least of all the president, is proposing. And we actually could get lower prices because the president and various presidential candidates have become such enthusiasts for federal subsidies for ethanol and other alternative fuels. If these fuels threaten seriously to dampen demand for oil, the Saudis might increase production enough to drive down oil prices, in order to make investments – investors beware – in alternative fuels even more uneconomic than they already are.

In the 20 years from 1987 to 2006, ExxonMobil invested more ($279 billion) than it earned ($266 billion). Five weeks after the company announced its 2006 earnings, it said it will invest $60 billion in oil and gas projects over the next three years. It will, unless a President Clinton and a Democratic-controlled Congress “take” Big Oil's profits, which are much smaller than Big Government's revenue from gasoline consumption.

Oil companies make about 13 cents on a gallon of gas. Government makes much more. The federal tax is 18.4 cents per gallon. Clinton's New York collects 42.4 cents a gallon. Forty-nine states – all but Alaska – make more than the oil companies do on every gallon.

In 1979 President Jimmy Carter, an early practitioner of the Oh, Woe! School of Planetary Analysis (today Al Gore is the dean of that school), said that oil wells were “drying up all over the world.” Not exactly.

In 1971, according to M.A. Adelman, an MIT economist, non-OPEC countries had remaining proven reserves of 200 billion barrels. After the next 33 years of global economic growth, Adelman says, those countries had produced 460 billion barrels and had 209 billion remaining. As for OPEC countries, in 1971 they had 412 billion in proven reserves; by 2004 they had produced 307 billion and had 819 billion remaining.

Note the adjective “proven.” In 1930, U.S. proven reserves were 13 billion barrels. Then we fought a global war, fueled the largest, most sustained economic expansion in human history, and achieved today's electricity-powered “information economy.” Today, America's proven reserves are about 30 billion barrels – not counting the perhaps 15 billion in the field discovered last year in deep water 175 miles off Louisiana's coast.

America produces about one-quarter of the 20.6 million barrels of oil it uses a day. Unfortunately, just as liberals love employees but not employers, they want energy independence but do not want to drill in the “pristine” (read: desolate) Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (potential yield: 10.4 billion barrels) and are reluctant to countenance drilling offshore.

Well, then, what can be done immediately about the gasoline “crisis” du jour? Americans could save 1.2 billion of the 130 billion gallons of gasoline they use a year if they would properly inflate their tires. And they might do that if ever “soaring” prices actually make gasoline unusually expensive.

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me@rescam.org

Mixed response to anti-smacking campaign
Friday Apr 6 16:03 AEST

A $2.5 million tax-payer funded campaign to warn parents not to smack their children has drawn mixed responses from parent groups and child experts.

The guidelines will be released by a child welfare agency supported by the federal government and will be available in 16 languages.

The Every Child is Important Program, developed by The Australian Childhood Foundation, advises parents that smacking children teaches them that violence is acceptable later in life.

The foundation says physical punishment can have an adverse impact on children's emotional development and "teaches children that violence can be an acceptable way to solve problems".

"Physical punishment can undermine a child's sense of love and security," the guidelines say.

"They can often become anxious, fearful or rebellious."

Chief executive of the Australian Childhood Foundation, Dr Joe Tucci, said parents should not have to hurt children to teach them a lesson.

"We need to think about whether this is the sort of tool we want to continue to use - just because their parents used it, does that mean we have to? I think the answer is no," he said.

Child and adolescent psychologist Kimberley O'Brien said smacking children provided them with a model for bad behaviour.

"There's been talk about just smacking them on the bottom or just behind the shoulders but I don't think it's ever okay to smack kids," she said.

"You see kids, even as toddlers, start smacking their parents back. You can't really blame the child. (Parents) are basically modelling bad behaviour to their children."

Ms O'Brien said smacking breached the trust a child has in a parent and it could affect them emotionally and behaviourally later on.

At some point the smacking had to stop and things could turn ugly if it continued up until the children were physically stronger, she said.

Ms O'Brien said parents needed to enforce basic house rules but remain calm and avoid screaming and hitting children when disciplining them.

Australian Parents Council executive director Ian Dalton said the group would only support the campaign if the government funded education initiatives teaching parents alternative methods of discipline.

"Whilst we all want to see an end to violence in our world, the reality is if you're going to encourage parents not to smack their children then you have to support that by also giving them the education and skills to be able to discipline their children in a more effective and appropriate way," he told AAP.

Mr Dalton, a social worker with a background in child and family counselling, said some teachers had struggled to find alternative methods of keeping children in line since the phasing out of corporal punishment in schools.

While there was a fine line between discipline and violence, smacking "as a last resort" was an effective means of discipline, he said.

"(But) young people have to be given every opportunity to grow and reach their full potential and (for) a lot of children who are subject to abuse, that capacity is impacted on," Mr Dalton said.

The Australian Family Association believed the campaign sent the wrong message to parents.

A spokesman argued there was a "vast difference" between encouraging a culture of violence in the home and the odd smack.

However, Associate Professor Margaret Sims from Edith Cowan University said the guidelines were a starting point for parents who needed to be re-educated about how to discipline their children.

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Join Calm Chaos

One of the most famous "don't smack your child" people, Dr. Benjamin Spock, came up with his theory early in his professional career. Long after his famous book was published, he was on a talk show in the early '70s and said that the best thing you could use his book for is to smack your kids with. Having his own children gave him a completely different outlook!

Smack your parents back??? Not in my day they didn't, it was unheard of.

Back in your day, elders were worthy of respect... They didn't need to demand it... ;)

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It may not be 1984 but George Orwell sure did see the future . . .

Since when does the current president consider himself a Ruler Meaning not have to answer to anyone about his actions.

Last time I checked the people we elect to office work us!!!! not the other way around!!

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LETS BEGIN IN 2010

A radio show of Myths & Legends? The Political Thread ups the ante.

Bill O'Reilly Vs Geraldo Rivera

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me@rescam.org

Junk food giants throw weight around

Article from: The Daily Telegraph

JUNK food giants have cowed Australia's food regulator from forcing them to show how much fat and sugar their so-called health products contribute to a person's daily intake.

Under pressure from food manufacturers, Food Standards Australia and New Zealand has backed down from mandating the information on food labels, claiming consumers "may become confused" and distort their diets in a way that could damage long-term health.

Manufacturers also argued that the fat content in foods such as nuts may put consumers off, despite the nutritional benefits of those healthy fats.

FSANZ also claimed the labels would be too difficult for consumers to understand.

Some 60 per cent of people look at food labels when shopping in the supermarket.

Melanie Fisher, FSANZ's General Manager of Food Standards, said consumers wanted simpler information on food packaging, and nutritional claims needed to be uniform and easily understood.

"During the last round of public comment we proposed including a percentage of daily kilojoules on the labels of foods making a nutrition claim such as 'low salt' or 'good source of calcium'," she said.

"We received a mixed response to this suggestion and we are now undertaking further consumer research and proposing that the percentage daily intake be considered in the broader labelling review we are scoping this year, rather than in this proposal."

A draft report released yesterday by the agency said nutritional claims on all foods would be legally enforced under the new regulations. They are currently only governed by industry codes of practice.

The move is significant following revelations that blackcurrant drink Ribena did not include the levels of Vitamin C that were advertised.

Pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline said the "blackcurrants in Ribena have four times the Vitamin C of oranges".

However, an experiment by two New Zealand schoolgirls proved otherwise, and the company was last week forced to pay a fine in New Zealand and ordered to issue advertising corrections in Australia.

Uncle Tobys, manufacturer of children's snack Roll-Ups, also has been in the spotlight for advertising the product as having "no added sugar", but failing to mention that it contains a high percentage of concentrated fruit juice, which has a sugar-like effect.

"To be eligible to make health claims, foods will need to meet a number of criteria.

"The standard provides a rigorous framework to assess claims linking a food to the reduction of risk of a certain disease - for example, fruit and vegetables reduce your risk of cardiovascular disease," Ms Fisher said.

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Join Calm Chaos

A sweetheart sentence for a repeat offender

San Diego Union-Tribune editorial

April 6, 2007

At some point, Americans are going to have to get tough on companies that knowingly hire illegal immigrants in blatant violation of the law. We're going to have do so to show we're serious about combatting illegal immigration, and that we realize the way to do that is by attacking the root of the problem with stiff fines and real jail time for repeat offenders.

But we're not there yet. In fact, whom are we kidding? We're not even close. Not when the principals of a Riverside-based fencing company get a virtual slap on the wrist after pleading guilty in federal court to repeatedly hiring illegal immigrants, and the rest of us get a slap in the face.

That's what happened when U.S. District Judge Barry Ted Moskowitz handed down a sweetheart sentence to Melvin Kay Jr., the founder and president of Golden State Fence Co., and his son-in-law and the company's vice president, Michael McLaughlin. The two men each received three years of probation, 1,040 hours of community service and 180 days of home detention with electronic monitoring. They and the company were also fined. Golden State Fence Co. will forfeit $4.7 million, the amount the government claims the company reaped in profits by using illegal immigrant labor. Kay was fined $200,000 and McLaughlin $100,000.

To most people, that probably sounds like a lot of money. But we're guessing it's not much for Kay and McLaughlin, who manage a company that rang up $150 million in sales in 2004. Ironically, much of that haul came from government contracts, including some for work on the fence between Mexico and the United States.

Anyway you slice it, probation, community service and house arrest – in what we imagine are some very nice houses – are far from the sentence they were eligible for: six months in prison.

Why the discrepancy? Defense attorneys insist Moskowitz must have taken into account that the current immigration system is broken and Congress needs to find a mature and workable solution that gives employers a legal means to hire undocumented immigrant workers to fill jobs that Americans aren't doing. These two individuals are certainly not the only people in the country who are hiring illegal immigrants, the attorneys said. So why throw the book at them?

That's a fair question. And here's the best answer: Because they broke the law, and Americans don't get to choose which laws they're going to adhere to and which they're going to violate. They also don't get to hide behind the fact that Congress is in the process of reforming the law they are accused of breaking. That reform could take years, heaven forbid. Or never happen at all. And we just can't declare a moratorium on law enforcement efforts and suitable punishments until lawmakers get their act together.

Kay and McLaughlin deserved more than six months of home vacation. They deserved to spend that time in a jail cell. And the fact that they won't tells us a great deal about how Americans got into this mess and how difficult it will be for us to get out of it.

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me@rescam.org

Learning from Britain on Iran

By Vali Nasr and Ray Takeyh

April 6, 2007

Through the capture and subsequent release of 15 British sailors and marines, the Islamic Republic of Iran has sent its adversaries a pointed message: Just as Iran will meet confrontation with confrontation, it will respond to what it perceives as flexibility with pragmatism. This message is worth heeding as the United States and Iran seem to be moving inexorably toward conflict.

The timing of the Britons' capture was no accident. The incident followed the news of certain passage of a United Nations resolution censuring Iran for its nuclear infractions, the dispatch of American aircraft carriers to the Persian Gulf and the American sanctioning of Iranian banks. Although the Bush administration has been busy proclaiming its increasingly confrontational Iran policy a success, Tehran's unsubtle conduct in the Persian Gulf suggests otherwise.

Had the British followed the American example, once the sailors and marines were seized, they could have escalated the conflict by pursuing the matter more forcefully at the United Nations or sending additional naval vessels to the area. Instead, the British tempered their rhetoric and insisted that diplomacy was the only means of resolving the conflict. The Iranians received this as pragmatism on London's part and responded in kind.

The United States, meanwhile, has pursued its policy of coercion for two months now, and one is hard-pressed to find evidence of success. Beyond even the symbolic move of apprehending the British sailors, Iran's intransigent position on the nuclear issue remains unchanged. To underscore that point, Iran has scaled back cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency and released a new currency note adorned with a nuclear emblem.

Moreover, although Iran has proved willing to talk to Saudi Arabia, especially regarding Lebanon, it has yielded no new ground. In fact, Saudi Arabia's concerns, relayed to Iran's chief nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, during his visit to Riyadh in January, went unanswered. And if the March 10 meeting of neighbors in Baghdad was supposed to bring a chastened Iran to the table, the opposite happened. Far from being accommodating, Iran boldly asked for a timetable for the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq. But the meeting was noteworthy in making a show of Iran's regional influence and its importance to the future of Iraq.

The United States faces a stark choice: It will have to either escalate its confrontational policy or adopt a policy of engagement. Far from arresting the Iranian danger, escalation would most likely present the United States with new perils. Given the balance of power in the region, a continued confrontational course with Iran would saddle the United States with a commitment to staying in the Persian Gulf indefinitely and deploying to other conflict areas in an environment of growing radicalism. It would place the United States at the heart of the region's conflicts, leaving it all the more vulnerable to ideological extremism and terrorism at home and abroad.

Beyond such concerns, a continued policy of confrontation would also complicate America's Iraq policy. Just as Iraqi Sunnis have cultural and political ties with Sunni Arab states and look to them for support, Iraqi Shiites trust and depend on Iran. An Iraq policy that allies the United States with Sunni Arab governments to eliminate Iranian influence in Iraq would be construed as biased against the Shiites. Such a policy would not win the support of the Shiite-dominated government on which the success of the new American strategy depends.

Since the United States entered Iraq in 2003, Washington has complained about Iran's meddling, and about its involvement with radical groups and militias. Still, Iran, far more than any of the Sunni Arab regimes, has also supported the Shiite-dominated government and the Iraqi political process that brought it to power. If Iraq were to exclude Iran and seek to diminish its regional influence, Iran would have no further vested interest in the Iraqi political process, and it could play a far more destabilizing role. Therefore, the current policy will not reduce the Iranian threat to Iraq but rather increase it.

Iran today sees regional stability in its interest. It abandoned the goal of exporting its revolution to its Persian Gulf neighbors at the end of the 1980s and has since acted as a status quo power. It seeks influence within the existing regional power structure. It improved its relations with its Persian Gulf neighbors throughout the 1990s, and in particular normalized relations with Saudi Arabia. Iran supported the stabilization of Afghanistan in 2001 and that of Iraq during the early phase of the occupation. Conflict will change the direction that Iranian foreign policy has been following, and this will be a change for the worse and for the more confrontational.

A judicious engagement policy will require patience and must begin with a fundamental shift in the style and content of American diplomacy. The breakthrough in American-Chinese relations during the Nixon administration followed such a course. Beijing responded favorably to engagement only after two years of unilateral American gestures. As part of a similar effort toward Iran, the United States should try to create a more suitable environment for diplomacy by taking actions that gradually breach the walls of mistrust.

Washington can begin by ending its provocative naval deployments in the Persian Gulf, easing its efforts to get European and Asian banks to divest from Iran and inviting Iranian representatives to all regional and international conferences dealing with the Middle East. Along this path, the language of American diplomacy would also have to alter. The administration cannot propose negotiations while castigating Iran as part of an “axis of evil” or the “central banker of terrorism” and forming a regional alliance to roll back Iranian influence.

Once a more suitable environment has been created, the United States should propose dialogue without conditions with the aim of normalizing relations. For too long, proposed talks with Iran have focused on areas of American concern: nuclear proliferation and Iraq. A more comprehensive platform would involve the totality of disagreements between the two countries and also address Iran's regional interests.

On the nuclear issue, Iran would have to accede to a rigorous inspection regime to make certain that its nuclear material would not be diverted for military purposes. In the meantime, more cooperative relations between the two parties could benefit stability in Iraq, where both Tehran and Washington support the same Shiite-led government.

After 28 years of sanctions and containment, it is time to accept that pressure has not tempered Iran's behavior. The release of the British captives shows that the Islamic Republic is still willing to mitigate its ideology with pragmatism. A policy of patient engagement would change the context, and that may lead Iran to see relations with America to be in its own interest. Only then would Tehran chart a new course at home and abroad.

Nasr is a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School and the author of “The Shia Revival: How Conflicts Within Islam Will Shape the Future.” Takeyh is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of “Hidden Iran: Paradox and Power in the Islamic Republic.”

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me@rescam.org

Giving in to Iran on its act of piracy

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER
THE WASHINGTON POST

April 6, 2007

Iran has pulled off a tidy little success with its seizure and subsequent release of those 15 British sailors and marines: a pointed humiliation of Britain, with a bonus demonstration of Iran's intention to push back against coalition challenges to its assets in Iraq. All with total impunity. Further, it exposed the utter futility of all those transnational institutions – most prominently the European Union and the United Nations – that pretend to maintain international order.

You would think maintaining international order means, at a minimum, challenging acts of piracy. No challenge here. Instead, a quiet capitulation.

The quid pro quos were not terribly subtle. An Iranian “diplomat” who had been held for two months in Iraq is suddenly released. Equally suddenly, Iran is granted access to the five Iranian “consular officials” – Revolutionary Guards who had been training Shiite militias to kill Americans and others – whom the United States had arrested in Irbil in January. There may have been other concessions we will never hear about. But the salient point is that what got this unstuck was American action.

Where then was the EU? These 15 hostages, after all, are not just British citizens, but under the laws of Europe, citizens of Europe. Yet the EU lifted not a finger on their behalf.

Europeans talk all the time about their preference for “soft power” over the brute military force those Neanderthal Americans resort to all the time. What was the soft power available here? Iran's shaky economy is highly dependent on European credits, trade and technology. Britain asked the EU to threaten to freeze exports, $18 billion a year of commerce. Iran would have lost its No. 1 trading partner. The EU refused.

Why was nothing done? The reason is simple. Europe functions quite well as a free-trade zone. But as a political entity, it is a farce. It remains a collection of sovereign countries with divergent interests. A freeze of economic relations with Europe would have shaken the Iranian economy to the core. Yet nothing was done. “The Dutch,” reports The Times of London, “said it was important not to risk a breakdown in dialogue.” So much for European solidarity.

Like other vaunted transnational institutions, the EU is useless as a player in the international arena. Not because its members are venal but because they are sovereign. Their interests are simply not identical.

The problem is most striking at the United Nations, the quintessential transnational institution with a mandate to maintain international peace and order. There was a commonality of interest at its origin – defeating Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. The war ended, but the wartime alliance of Britain, France, the United States, China and Russia proclaimed itself nonetheless the guardian of postwar “collective security” as the Security Council.

Small problem: Their interests are not collective. They are individual. Take the Iranian nuclear program. Russia and China make it impossible to impose any serious sanctions. China has an interest in maintaining strong relations with a major energy supplier, and is not about to jeopardize that over Iranian nukes that are no threat to it whatsoever. Russia sees Iran as a useful proxy in resisting Western attempts to dominate the Persian Gulf.

Ironically, the existence of transnational institutions such as the United Nations makes it harder for collective action against bad actors. In the past, interested parties would simply get together in temporary coalitions to do what they had to do. That is much harder now because they feel such action is illegitimate without the blessing of the Security Council.

The result is utterly predictable. Nothing has been done about the Iranian bomb. In fact, the only effective sanctions are those coming unilaterally out of the U.S. Treasury.

Remember the great return to multilateralism – the new emphasis on diplomacy and “working with the allies” – so widely heralded at the beginning of the second Bush administration? To general acclaim, the cowboys had been banished and the grown-ups brought back to town.

What exactly has the new multilateralism brought us? North Korea tested a nuclear device. Iran has accelerated its march to develop the bomb. The pro-Western government in Beirut hangs by a thread. The Darfur genocide continues unabated.

The capture and release of the 15 British hostages illustrates once again the fatuousness of the “international community” and its great institutions. You want your people back? Go to the EU and get stiffed. Go to the Security Council and get a statement that refuses even to “deplore” this act of piracy. (You settle for a humiliating expression of “grave concern.”) Then turn to the despised Americans. They'll deal some cards and bail you out.

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me@rescam.org

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Account frozen...

A radio show of Myths & Legends? The Political Thread ups the ante.

Bill O'Reilly Vs Geraldo Rivera

That isn't Myth or Legend worthy. That exchange was nothing more than a contest to see who was better at self promotion.

You'll have to do better than that...lol

A radio show of Myths & Legends? The Political Thread ups the ante.

Bill O'Reilly Vs Geraldo Rivera

That isn't Myth or Legend worthy. That exchange was nothing more than a contest to see who was better at self promotion.

You'll have to do better than that...lol

Then visit the Predictor thread.

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me@rescam.org

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Account frozen...

Iran chooses to ignite a crisis, then ends it

By George Friedman

April 8, 2007

Fifteen British sailors and marines captured by the Iranians in the Shatt al-Arab area spent 13 days in captivity. The Iranians claimed the British personnel were in Iranian territory; the British denied it. The claims and counterclaims are less interesting than the fact that the Iranians clearly planned the capture. Why capture them now?

By now, it is no secret that the Americans and Iranians are engaged in a complex bilateral negotiation focused on Iraq. At the same time, multilateral discussions on Iran's nuclear program also are occurring. Whatever is said publicly, these issues are obviously linked. U.S. and Iranian officials met publicly in early March and a further meeting is scheduled, but the most important discussions have taken place in private venues. It also is clear that there is a debate in Tehran, as well as in Washington, as to whether these talks should be going on, how the negotiations should be carried out and the role of force in the negotiations.

At this point, both sides in the negotiations are trying to impress upon each other not only that they retain room for maneuver, but that they are unpredictable. The capture of the British personnel then should be read not so much as the trigger for an international crisis as a diplomatic signal. If either the Americans or the Iranians believed it were possible to achieve their own ideal outcomes in negotiations, either the capture or the U.S. military surge into Iraq would not have happened. The game for each now is an effort to secure an outcome that can be lived with – not an outright victory.

The U.S. approach to the negotiations with Iran has been multifaceted.

First, by also talking with the Sunni insurgents, the Americans clearly have been letting the Iranians know that they have not been trapped into dealing only with the Iranians or Iraqi Shia when it comes to the future of Iraq.

Second, Washington has tried to keep the Iranian nuclear issue separate from the Iraq issue. Given that none of the world's great powers truly has an interest in seeing Iran get the bomb, Washington has international backing on some aspects of the Iran nuclear issue – and does not want that confused with the question of Iraq, where support for its position is much weaker. Iran wants to maintain its ability to extract concessions over Iraq in exchange for concessions on the nuclear issue. Washington is trying to limit that.

Third, and most important, the U.S. leadership consistently has emphasized that it has no fear of Iran and is not constrained politically or militarily. The entire objective of the U.S. surge strategy was to demonstrate that the administration retains military options in Iraq. The United States has also carefully orchestrated a campaign to let the Iranians believe that it retains military options against Iran as well – and is considering using them. The exercises by two U.S. carrier battle groups last week had been planned for quite a while and were designed to give the Iranians pause.

Finally, the United States has moved to arrest Iranian officials who had been operating quasi-diplomatic entities in Iraq, to show that they are unconcerned about Iran's responses.

Rumors of imminent U.S. military action against Iran have swept the region for weeks. The rumors suited the Bush administration perfectly. The administration wanted the Iranians to feel endangered, so as to shape the Iranian negotiating process. Apart from the diplomatic process, this was important as Congress moved toward setting a deadline for a withdrawal from Iraq. If the Americans are going to withdraw, then Iran has no motivation to negotiate; it need only wait. The administration used the threat of a deadline to create a sense of urgency in its actions and enhance the sense of Iranian insecurity.

The problem for the United States, however, is that it really doesn't have feasible military options. It is in no position to undertake a ground invasion of Iran. Occupying Iran is beyond the capability of any force the United States could field – at least, not without a massive increase of ground forces that would take several years.

Another option is an air campaign, which would not likely work. The example of Israel's failure in Lebanon last summer weighs heavily. The U.S. Army historically has seen the air campaign as useful only if it is followed by an effective occupation. In Iran, the quantity of air power needed for an outcome similar to that in Kuwait in 1991 is substantially greater than the United States has available, and as we have said, there is no follow-on ground force capable of occupying Iran.

Another option discussed is a naval blockade of Iran. There are two problems with this option. First, what would the United States do if a Russian or Chinese ship decided to run the blockade? This is hardly the time for another international crisis. Second, the Iranians have countermoves to a blockade, ranging from firing anti-ship missiles at Kuwaiti or Saudi tankers, inciting Shiites in the Arabian Peninsula or creating havoc in parts of Iraq. The blockade option sounds good, but it opens the door to chaos.

The Iranians, as the Americans, need to show they are not intimidated and have options. Capturing 15 British military personnel was intended to show that. First, it raised the specter in the United States of another Iranian hostage crisis, reminding Bush of how the Iranians handled Jimmy Carter in 1979. Second, it showed that Iran is not concerned about possible retaliation by either the United States or the United Kingdom. Of course, the fact that action was directed against the British, rather than the Americans, slightly deflected the intensity of the crisis. If these had been American military personnel, the atmosphere would have been much tenser.

But there is another piece. The Iranians have shifted the spotlight away from Baghdad to southern Iraq – the area dominated by Shia. The capture of the British sailors and marines coincided with fighting in the Basra area among Shiite militias.

In this way, the Iranians have sent two signals.

The first was that while the United States is concentrating its forces in Baghdad and Anbar province, Iran remains perfectly capable of whipping up a crisis in the relatively quiet south – where the British, who already have established a timeline for withdrawal, might not have sufficient force to deal with it. If the United States had to inject forces into the south at this point, they would have to come from other regions of Iraq or from the already strained reserve forces in the United States. The Iranians were signaling that they could create some serious political and military problems for the United States if Washington becomes aggressive.

The second is a statement about the negotiations over Iraq. While they are interested in reaching a comprehensive settlement over Iraq, the Iranians are prepared to contemplate another outcome, in which Iraq fragments into regional entities and the Iranians dominate the Shiite south. In some ways, this is more than an acceptable alternative. For one thing, in holding the south the Iranians would be in a position to impede or cut U.S. lines of supply running from Kuwait to central Iraq. Second, their forces and allies would be in a position to bring pressure to bear on Saudi Arabia, unless the United States was to redeploy troops, a worrisome military challenge to the Americans.

The Iranians have called the American hand and raised the stakes. Where the United States has been trying to generate a sense of danger on the part of Iran with rumors of airstrikes, the Iranians have signaled that they aren't worried about the airstrikes – and then raised the American bet by forcing the United States to consider what its options might be if all hell broke loose in southern Iraq.

There is obviously a political debate going on inside Iran. There is deep consensus among Iranian leaders as to what outcome they want, but there is a faction led by older leaders, including Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, that does not underestimate the resources of the United States. And there is a faction that argues that the United States, at its weakest, must be pressured until it capitulates. The capture of the British personnel may have been designed to enhance the power of the more aggressive faction. But because Iranian politics are opaque, it could be argued just as logically that the capture was designed to enhance Rafsanjani's position by setting up a game of “good cop, bad cop.” Rafsanjani now can ask for concessions from the Americans to keep the other faction from going too far.

The Iranians know they have a weak hand as well. The Iraqi Shiites are highly fragmented and many are suspicious of Iranian motives. Iran does not have the level of control it would like others to believe. Moreover, Iran's greatest nightmare is a Sunni-dominated government in Baghdad, armed by the United States, threatening another horrific war against Iran. Given U.S. discussions with Sunnis and the history of Iraq, this is not an unreasonable fear. Iran does not want to wake up in five or 10 years to see itself facing the Iraq of 1980. Iran can push the United States only so far.

Both sides are playing weak hands for very high stakes. Both know it, though they need to pretend that they aren't. That is what negotiated settlements are all about. But to make the deal work, aircraft carriers need to be maneuvering and sailors must be captured.

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me@rescam.org

Refuting Iran's lies

By Robert J. Caldwell

April 8, 2007

Now we know what really happened in the Shatt al-Arab waterway on March 23 and in the 13 days of captivity that followed for 15 British sailors and marines. It wasn't the lies you heard from Iran's top officials, starting with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, or the cruelly coerced statements of the British captives in Iran's propaganda videos.

The 15 Royal Navy sailors and Royal Marines were finally free to talk Friday, and they did, volubly.

Safely back in Britain, they flatly refuted the fairy tales told by the Iranians and the collaborating statements they had been pressured to make by their captors.

Were they, in fact, in Iraqi, not Iranian, territorial waters when they were seized in an obviously preplanned ambush by maritime units of Iran's heavily armed Revolutionary Guards?

Three sets of Global Positioning Satellite coordinates say they were right where the British government insisted they were – 1.7 miles inside the internationally recognized Iraqi side of the Shatt al-Arab waterway's boundary line. Their own hand-held GPS devices, those in a Royal Navy helicopter monitoring their movements from overhead and the precise navigational instrumentation of the British navy frigate Cornwall from which they operated all attested to their correct position.

In Iranian custody, several of the British service members made videotaped statements professing guilt for having “intruded” into Iranian waters. Multiple letters allegedly written by Faye Turney, the one female British sailor captured, stated that the Brits had “obviously” trespassed into Iranian waters. The letters, composed in stilted English, were clearly concocted by the Iranians, not written by Turney. Over the 13 days, the Iranians announced that all 15 of the British sailors and marines had “confessed” to being on Iran's side of the Shatt al-Arab.

Hogwash would be the polite term for Iran's claims and for these purported confessions.

How did the Iranians extract these admissions?

Not by the supposedly humane treatment they claimed to have accorded the captured young Britons. Quite the contrary.

In interviews Friday with reporters at a military base in England, the sailors and marines said they were subjected to unrelenting psychological pressure. For starters, their Iranian captors told them that if they confessed to violating Iran's sovereignty and territorial waters they would be freed in a matter of days. If they refused to confess, they would be put on trial, convicted and then spend up to seven years in prison in Iran. What would you do?

The former captives said they were kept in isolation. They knew nothing about what their own government, Britain's allies, the United Nations or anyone else was doing to free them. Seven years in an Iranian prison versus a transparent falsehood that they could disavow the moment they were released. They did what most of us would have done. They lent themselves as propaganda props to Iran's international deception.

Remember the seemingly reassuring video of the captives sitting together and eating from paper plates piled high with food? All agitprop, to borrow a Cold War term for propaganda and psychological warfare.

In reality, the freed captives now reveal, they were initially blindfolded, stripped of their uniforms, bound, pushed against a wall from which they could hear guns being cocked in the next room, and later confined in tiny individual cells. Isolation and solitary confinement are classic techniques for breaking the morale, group solidarity and resolution of prisoners.

These are techniques the Iranians, veteran hostage-takers, know well.

During the 444 days in which American diplomats and U.S. Embassy staff were held hostage in Iran from 1979 to 1981, the Iranians used death threats, repeated mock executions, selective beatings, coercive interrogations and all manner of psychological pressure to break their captives. In Lebanon during the 1980s, the Iranians orchestrated the kidnapping and holding for ransom of various Americans, mostly civilians, and others. The victims of this cruel torment were held for years, bound, isolated and constantly terrorized.

A CIA officer kidnapped in Lebanon was beaten and tortured to death. A kidnapped U.S. Marine major, assigned as liaison to United Nations peacekeepers in Lebanon, was shown in a grisly video hanged by his captors.

The Iranians were less physically brutal with their British captives but the coercive intent was the same: the cruel manipulation of hostages for Iran's international agenda of deception and intimidation.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair insists that no concessions were made and no deals, private or otherwise, struck with the Iranians to obtain the release of the 15 British sailors and marines. Let's hope so. Hostage-taking must never, ever be rewarded.

If Britain's government, its 15 Royal Navy sailors and Royal Marines and all the documentary navigational and GPS coordinates evidence the British have is correct, the armed seizure of these British military personnel was an act of piracy and war.

Britain's anti-smuggling, anti-terrorist enforcement mission in the Shatt al-Arab waterway is explicitly sanctioned by the United Nations. U.S. and Iraqi forces are performing the same mission in accordance with the same U.N. authorization. All, we must now conclude, are potentially vulnerable to Iranian attack along that narrow waterway or in the Persian Gulf.

Part of the appropriate deterrent is what military professionals would call more robust Rules of Engagement. In plain English, any future attempts at hostage-taking by Iran outside its territorial waters should be repelled by coalition forces fully authorized to defend themselves with lethal force.

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me@rescam.org